rsync Resources

Backing Up Your Hosted Website

Hardly anyone hosts their own web servers anymore, and hosting
space is cheaper than ever. If you're using shared hosting, rather than a dedicated server, you won't have root access and can't directly follow our rsync setup tutorial.

If you'd like a few tips and tricks to getting using your EVBackup account with shared (non-root) hosting space, read on.

Web Host Requirements

Here are the services that your webhost needs to be able to support
in order to backup to your EVBackup account:

Shell access (SSH, preferrably but telnet /rsh will work as well)

rsync (We only support full backups once per month; all other backups are incremental)

cron / crontab (Something needs to run tasks automatically on a scheduled basis)

Administrative Requirements

Put simply, this is a list of required skills that you need to have to
be able to effectively setup and manage backing up your hosted web site
to your EVBackup account:

Data directories. If you upload files (images, zip files, etc.)
other than your web pages, then you'll want to back those up too.

Each of these items can be backed up with it's own rsync script,
or as separate directives in a single script. Either way works —
it all depends upon how much data you have and how often it needs
to be backed up. For example, if the source code of your web pages
doesn't change all that often — but your database changes daily —
then you might want to backup your web pages once per month and your
databases daily.

Troubleshooting

Here are some common problems that people encounter when backing up
their hosted websites to their EVBackup accounts. If you need further
help, please let us know:

No Super User (root or sudo) Access

This is the most common problem you're likely to run into; if you're on a shared hosting server you
almost certainly won't have root access. There are two changes that need to be made to our tutorials:

Remove the sudo directive from all commands. This will run your commands as your local user, not root.

Preface your home directory before all the /backup directory paths; e.g. ~/backup. You must do this because you won't have write permissions for the backup directory unless it is located inside your home directory.

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Example Command Shown in Tutorials

sudo mkdir /backup

Example Command without sudo and with ~ path

mkdir ~/backup

Finding rsync and cron

Some web hosts don't have rsync and cron readily available to you; while others
don't have rsync and cron installed. Generally, you find out about
this when you type rsync into a SSH terminal and the following is returned:

rsync: command not found

To find out if rsync, cron (or any other Unix tool) is installed, enter
the following into the SSH shell.

whereis rsync

whereis cron

If they are installed, you should see something similar to the following:

rsync: /usr/bin/rsync /usr/share/man/man1/rsync.1.gz

cron: /usr/sbin/cron

If they are found, then you can simply substitute the full path to the command: